Reimagining the customer service journey

And also, in the e-commerce and in fact, the entire retail industry, there are a lot of spikes that happen throughout the year. Which essentially means you need to add the number of people who are taking calls or answering chat and emails for a very short duration of time and then decommission it. With the existing model, there were multiple challenges. Adding to this there were challenges around speed at which we could answer some of the things, easy to integrate with some of the internal systems. Integration will CCT was a challenge. So, these were multiple issues that we had and we had already reached about 800-900 FTEs is in terms of strength. We did a very, very detailed evaluation of various cloud-based CRM solutions that are currently in play. And then we finally chose SFDC. Post that, we had a very detailed implementation partner evaluation process as well. That is where this whole discussion started and we finalised PwC as our partner who will help us in implementing this solution end to end.

Anjumara Syed, Partner & Salesforce Technology Consulting, PwC India: So as PwC when we started interacting with Tata CLiQ, and we were understanding the challenges they were facing, we found they were looking for a service transformation to bring in client excellence. And that one of the ways for doing it was via Salesforce. Very important it was to bring all the fragmented systems together to provide a holistic view in terms of customer information, in terms of data lying around everywhere – to bring it together to help increase ROI and NPS.

For doing that we had multiple rounds of discussions – right from Sales to Business to Operations and also the senior management to understand what is the “as is” process. We understood what is currently being done as business processes, call-center processes and then redefined it. Not to make it just the “as is” process but to make it a two-way process – to optimisation, standarisation and further enhancing the complete service excellence to be delivered.

Nishant Kalra, Country Head & RVP – Digital Business, Salesforce: Tata CLiQ wanted to give their agents a customer 360-degree view. Their agents were currently struggling with multiple windows across their commerce back-end, ERP solutions and they dialers. This resulted in delays in critical processes, like refunds and returns.

Anjumara Syed: The complete Salesforce solutioning that we built on was where we looked at what are the systems that we want to bring together to provide a unified customer experience. And that is not through one channel, but across multiple channels, bringing in that real omni-channel integration. Bringing it all together to provide that proactive communication so that the customer feels that it is more personalised to the customer calling in to their call centers. Because we had that data access provided through customer 360. Reduce cost because there was less of calling. Again, this was achieved through the service excellence part that we really wanted to bring in this transformation. The surveys helped to understand the feedback, which further helped track the overall net promoter score and CSAT over time.

Shounak Gadre, Partner – Front Office Transformation, PwC India: Tata CLiQ has really been one of the most exciting projects that I worked on. Under the entire Front Office Transformation umbrella, we looked at this problem statement from a perspective of what's the customer strategy? What does Tata CLiQ really want to stand for?

We articulated that in the form of what we call as the customer service promise. This was done in the set of detailed discussions and brainstorming with the customer service head and the Leadership at Tata CLiQ. Having done that, we then defined what metrics and what governance process are important to make sure that the organisation is able to deliver upon them. This was then translated into a set of functional requirements and technical requirements, wherein we worked closely with our PwC colleagues from the Technology team and the sector teams to make this happen. And to that extent, I think it is truly a case of an integrated solution. We're starting from the customer strategy to defining what metrics are important and then translating that into a tool which can be used on an ongoing basis.

Nishant Kalra: Salesforce really helped Tata CLiQ to reimagine the service process. This was combined with powerful tools like case flows to ensure that critical business processes. Intelligent routing ensured that the right case flows to the right agent based upon skill and availability. AI to deliver critical insights, knowledge base to ensure that we have consistent answers. When we hit the implementation we encountered two critical challenges. A – how do we keep pace with the innovation? B – how do we ensure that there is a scalability of the solution specially during the festive season, It also offers a low quote platform to make the business more agile. It has also invested into Hyperforce, which is Salesforce on major public clouds to not only deliver, the required compliance security, but also deliver scalability.

It was always one team from day one. PwC's deep industry, expertise digital superior skills, Salesforce programmatics to ensure that we deliver the scalability required by the business, Salesforce customer success group to ensure adoption of best practices. All of these teams came together to reimagine service and deliver the single source of truth.

K Dharmarajan: I have personally been involved in almost 5 to 6 CRM implementations and SFDC twice. Hands down, this was the smoothest implementation that I have been a part of. We didn’t miss the timeline by more than two to three weeks, which is almost a miracle. Post the implementation completion, which happened in this February 2021, in the six months’ time frame, we have moved up on practically all the metrics. AHT has come down by about 15-16 percent. The first call resolution has improved by about 25-30 percent. Agent experience has improved to almost 30 percent predominantly because earlier, agents were toggling between multiple screens. Today, we have just a single interface which they use for all kinds of CRM needs. So all in all, a big thumbs-up to the entire implementation team of PwC and the product team of SFDC to understand what exactly our requirements were and be able to sort of deliver all those requirement in a pre-defined timeframe and the metric expectation as well. That's what I wanted to share. Great work all around.